Cancer detecting dogs

Cancer detecting dogs

Most animal lovers would agree that a dog is mans best friend. They guard our homes, give us unconditional love and make great and loyal companions. These are only some of the many traits of the world’s greatest pet. With so many qualities, it should come as no big surprise that to add to the list is another interesting ability- the ability to detect cancer!
Dogs have a tremendously keen sense of smell. Their sense of smell exceeds ours by a staggering 100,000 times. Using this acute sense of smell, dogs are reported to have detected cancer even in its early stages by sniffing human urine, breath and skin. Experiments carried out by researches showed that dogs could detect bladder cancer by sniffing urine and lung cancer by sniffing breath in humans. Breast cancer and skin cancer were also detected by dogs in case studies. Cases in which cancer which were in their early stages and thus undetected were found out by the strong smelling ability of the dogs.
A dogs ability to sniff out cancer is promising to be more effective then conventional scientific equipment and also least expensive. Already dogs are being trained to detect cancer and that means a lot of human lives will be saved, especially in the third world countries where scanning for cancer with machines is not easily affordable or accessible. Three cheers for mans best friend!